The title of Maan Barua’s book, Lively Cities, says it all. This is a book of urban theory that takes cities’ immanent aliveness as its starting point, aiming to formulate a language that allows us to grasp the multifold interrelations of human and other-than-human worlds. By choosing a multispecies ethnographic approach that includes other than humans and sees them as active participants in and observers of the urban, Barua proposes a theoretical intervention that goes beyond common approaches to urban economy, planning, and design. His goal is to bring various ontological strands in urban studies into conversation and “open avenues for a plural reckoning of urban worlds and for an analytical grammar attuned to the lively, and living, city” (p. 2f). This grammar he proposes is what he calls the urban in a “minor key,” which is attuned to the rhythms, dependencies, commensalities, and variations of human and other-than-human life in the city. The minor, however, is not separate from the major, but rather tries “to rework a major language from within, to formulate concepts and denominations of the urban canon differently” (p. 32).
Barua traces other-than-human lives and livelihoods in Delhi and London. Here, the focus is on three species in particular: rhesus macaques, a monkey species that is very common in central and south Asia; parakeets; and cattle, each to which the book attributes two chapters. The author creates a delicate meshwork of personal stories and archival data to exemplify the multifold interrelations between human and other-than-human worlds. Illustrating such human-animal relations, Barua traces the precarious livelihoods of urban dairy farmers in Delhi and of a bird entertainer in Kensington Gardens in London, who as a refugee is unable to find any other work (to name a few). The author aims to flesh out the affective dimensions of human-animal encounters in the city, be it in the form of bird feeding or in donating food for macaques at temples in Delhi, which is seen as a cure for earthly tribulations. By describing such practices of provisioning and care, the author reads urban ecologies in terms of commensality, thereby questioning postcolonial ideas of what counts as urban practice.
The book further discusses often violent planning measures that aim to regulate and hinder other-than-human life in cities. These span from Delhi’s masterplan to remove cattle and transport them to dairies at the outskirts of the city, to London’s practice of trapping and shooting parakeets that are deemed invasive to the United Kingdom and said to unbalance British avian ecologies. While at first glance, the examples from Delhi and London seem unrelated, a historical perspective reveals how notions of regulating other-than-human urban life through modern planning are informed by the colonial and postcolonial relations of Britain and India, which permeate both case study cities to this day. Barua discusses, for instance, how throughout the planning history of Delhi, there have been attempts to regulate cattle and macaque populations inspired by colonial ideas of hygiene and orderly city life. Reversely, in London, we find parakeets that originate from North India, where they were caught and then exported to the U.K. and other European countries to entertain the wealthy. Yet, these colonial entanglements persist to this day. Colonial and racist ideas are replicated in U.K. bird societies’ debates on avian nativism, in which parakeets are seen as harmful intruders—mirroring debates on human migration to the U.K. At the same time, bird watching and feeding is a popular pastime in the U.K., hinging on bird food imported to the U.K. from India, exploiting the farmers who now sell the nyjer seeds they originally depended on as a local subsistence crop.
Barua’s deeply descriptive observations help to rewrite theories of urban ecology and urban metabolism and offer an innovative lens in studying the urban. Yet, the idea of the urban in a “minor key” could be fleshed out in more detail. The author discusses the minor at the beginning and at the end of the book, yet in the empirical examples the connections are not always clear. This might be due to the wealth of terminology that is used—meshwork, patchwork, commensality, recombinant urbanism—which diverts attention away from the main argument. Barua’s arguments are theoretically dense and challenging at times, yet the empirical material is highly engaging, which makes the book also accessible to students and less experienced readers. Unfortunately, though, the theoretical and empirical contributions leave little room for a more in-depth treatment of methodological and ethical questions in multispecies ethnography. As the book draws on an innovative methodology, it is a pity that the reader is given little chance to engage with the methodological background, the author’s positionality, and their relationship to research participants, as well as to the two cities under study.
Still, Lively Cities is highly insightful and informative. Four main assertions stand out: Firstly, Barua cautions us to see the urban as not separate from the agrarian and the pastoral. By tracing other-than-human life in Delhi and London, he shows that “the urban and the agrarian or pastoral are immanent to one another, lying on the same plane and working on one another from within, albeit in historically specific ways” (p. 193). Secondly, by acknowledging other-than-human life in the city, the author demonstrates that animals can adapt to urban life and become place-makers themselves, even if in ways that escape traditional urban planning. Thirdly, Barua’s multispecies ethnography illustrates the complexity of human and other-than-human life. Urban metabolism involves the literary metabolism of animals, the labor they do in providing milk and meat, as well as their impact on urban space, for instance, in terms of waste management in Delhi where cattle graze on dumps and are fed left-over foods. Lastly, Lively Cities is a call for building more caring and welcoming environments for everyone, humans and other than humans alike. By pointing to “a surge in hostile architecture, primarily aimed at the unhoused and the home-lessed,” Barua underscores that “[h]ostility extends to other-than-human bodies” (p. 167). Lively and living cities should thus respect and enable life in all its forms. Therefore, Lively Cities is an important extension to urban theory and other-than-human geographies as it acknowledges the aliveness that is often invisiblized by major approaches to the urban.—Judith Keller, Heidelberg University, Germany